Would you get lost while driving downtown if you didn’t use GPS? Do you find yourself struggling to read a book for more than five minutes without checking your phone? Would you have trouble writing a grammatically-correct email without Google’s auto-suggested corrections?
Do moments where you run up against your dependence on modern technology get you wondering about the ways some of your personal capabilities seem to be atrophying?
Graham Lee has spent years thinking about this idea. While he’s a digital skills educator who appreciates the way technology can enhance our abilities, he worries that our ever-increasing reliance on algorithms and artificial intelligence may be robbing us of elements that are vital to the core of who we are.
Lee is the author of Human Being: Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology, and today on the show, we talk about some of those dozen endangered skills, including navigation, reading, writing, craftsmanship, and solitude. Lee offers case studies on how these skills enhance our humanness, why their loss matters, and how we can reclaim these capabilities and a greater sense of satisfaction and self-efficacy.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- We, the Navigators, The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific by David Lewis
- AoM series on learning how to navigate with a map and compass
- AoM Podcast #534: How Navigation Makes Us Human
- AoM Podcast #793: The New Science of Metabolism and Weight Loss
- AoM article on the benefits of solitude
- Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition by Peter Nabokov
- Watchmaker Geoge Daniels
- Castaway Alexander Selkirk
- NotebookLM
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Would you get lost while driving downtown if you didn’t use GPS? Do you find yourself struggling to read a book for more than five minutes without checking your phone? Would you have trouble writing a grammatically correct email without Google’s auto-suggested corrections? Do moments where you run up against your dependence on modern technology get you wondering about the way some of your personal capabilities seem to be atrophied? Graham Lee has spent years thinking about this idea. While he’s a digital skills educator who appreciates the way technology can enhance our abilities, he worries that our ever-increasing reliance on algorithms and artificial intelligence may be robbing us of elements that are vital to the core of who we are. Lee is the author of “Human Being Reclaim: Twelve Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology,” and today on the show, we talk about some of those dozen endangered skills, including navigation, reading, writing, craftsmanship, and solitude. Lee offers case studies on how these skills enhance o4ur humanness, why their loss matters, and how we can reclaim these capabilities for a greater sense of satisfaction and self-efficacy.
After the show is over, check out our shots at A1.is/human being. All right, Graham Lee, welcome to the show.
Graham Lee: Thank you.
Brett McKay: So you are a digital skills educator. What sorts of digital skills do you teach?
Graham Lee: So over the years, I’ve taught all manner of different digital skills, from the likes of digital marketing to various digital technologies and how to use them. Things like analytics, data science, UX design, various aspects like that.
Brett McKay: Okay, so what’s interesting though, despite being a digital skills educator, you wrote a book called “Human Being Reclaim: Twelve Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology,” which is about how our reliance on technology and digital tools that you teach is making us less human. So how did a guy who teaches digital skills end up writing a book about how our digital technology is robbing us of our humanness?
Graham Lee: Yeah, no, good point. I mean, I was finding in training people, I think just through that process that I just began to get a sense of something going missing with people spending just the type of people we work with, where typically they’re in roles, so they’re very digitally orientated, a lot of screen time. I just began to notice and I began to read up on the topic. There’s a lot of technology criticism literature out there, and I dug quite deep into it, got very interested, but found that a lot of it was doom saying, and didn’t really offer any practical guidance as to what to do about any of these aspects of whatever might be negative about how we interact with technology today. So I began to think, well, what can we? Technology is not going. It clearly is here to stay and if anything, is just becoming increasingly a part of our lives. So I just began to think, well, what’s the middle ground? How can we enjoy the benefits of it whilst also mitigating the negative sides that can happen?
Brett McKay: How did you select the twelve skills that ended up in your book?
Graham Lee: Yeah, I mean, that was through a lot of careful thinking. One of the chapters is reading, which touches on commonplace books, which was discipline that people back in the 18th century and beyond used to use. And if they were ever studying a topic, they would have different headings in a book that often were just a simple word. And I used that process. So I sort of delved into across this literature where I felt skills were being impacted and I whittled down eventually to these twelve. But what I found really was they touch on almost every part of our lives and some of the most fundamental things that we do day to day.
Brett McKay: So someone might hear the theme of your book and retort, well, do we really need to be able to do things like navigate, which is one of the skills you talk about, or memorize things, if technology can do them faster and better? I mean, can offloading things to technology allow us to do more of other things? What’s your response to that argument?
Graham Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s certainly some things that it’s really handy and pleasant and useful to offload to computers. There’s certainly no doubt about that. But there’s some critical abilities, whether they’re learned or innate, that are very much part of who we are as human beings. And when we begin to offload those, it is to the detriment of our own personal capabilities. And those capabilities often spin out to other aspects of our lives. So my principle really, and this is the key thread that I run through the book, is we’re at risk of losing really key parts of us and important notions of what makes us capable and able in different parts of our lives.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Something I think about is whenever we rely too much on technology, we reduce some of the joy we can experience as human beings. Some of these skills you talk about, like navigation, one of the things I find incredibly satisfying, I mean, I use GPS all the time to, you know, if I’m going to a restaurant that I’ve never been before in town, I’ll just pull it up in Google Maps and just get there as quickly as possible. But I’ve noticed one of the things I enjoy, I get a lot of satisfaction out of is just navigating on my own, trying to figure things out, looking at the lay of the land and using my own innate sense of direction to figure out, well, I know this restaurant’s in this location, how can I get there? And sometimes you get lost. That’s part of the fun of navigating on your own as well, because you.
Learn things about your city that you didn’t know about. So whenever I rely on Google Maps, I miss out on that.
Graham Lee: True? Yeah. No, exactly. I think what you miss out on is, there’s a loss of awareness of your surroundings, the attention that you have to focus outwards when you’re trying to make your own way and learn the environment around you, versus having your head down and just being guided. So that’s the prime difference, really.
Brett McKay: And the other thing too, I’ve noticed too, is when I rely too much on technology, when the technology doesn’t work, I end up being helpless. Everyone’s probably experienced that when they’re using Google Maps, there’s construction, and the maps hasn’t updated for that construction. And you’re like, well, what do I do now? [laughter] Or you take the turn that Google tells you to take, and actually that’s not the most efficient or effective way.
Graham Lee: That’s right. I mean, there can be those moments where you suddenly feel a bit hapless or there’s a gap, you stumble a bit mentally. And I think those are the times to look out for, whether it’s navigating or whatever skill it might be, I often find those are the prompts that show you that something’s going missing and that can help to alert you.
Brett McKay: And something too, I’ve noticed. I’m not against using technology. I use a lot of technology to make my work more efficient. But one thing I’ve noticed is that by knowing how to do these things, we’ll call it manually, like in my head, without using the technology, I’m better able to understand how the technology works and actually make it work for me. So here’s an example going back to my law school days. So in legal research, when you’re researching a case on how to, you know, argue for it, write a memo or write a brief, you have to look at case law. So you have to look at previous cases to bolster your argument for your case. And when we were in law school, one of the things we did that first week, we learned how to find case law using these books. Westlaw has these series of books that you can use to find cases and it’s this elaborate keyword system. So you have to, like, know the keyword and then you can find the keyword. And from the keyword, you can find the cases in the case books. And they spend a, you know, a week or two teaching us how to use these physical books to find case law.
But the thing is, you can, Westlaw has like an online thing where you just, like, type in your legal issue and it’ll bring up the cases. But the legal research and writing people said, well, the reason why we tell you how to use this tactile system is that you’re better able to understand how the law is organized so that whenever you go and you just use the search feature, you’ll understand how you got the result. And maybe the search feature didn’t give you all the results that you know you needed. Maybe by going through the books, you’re able to serendipitously find things you otherwise wouldn’t find. And I’ve noticed that with, when I use tools like Grammarly for my writing to edit, because I’ve spent so much time learning how to write, you know, in college and in law school, sometimes Grammarly will give you suggestions and you’re like, that’s actually not good. I don’t like that suggestion. So I’ll ignore it. And I imagine someone who didn’t go through that experience, you didn’t have that scaffolding in the elements of good writing. They would just think, well, you know, Grammarly says do it like that.
So I’ll just do what it says. And it might actually not be the best option.
Graham Lee: Yeah. Yeah. So I think what you’re saying there is that any guidance on how to help with a skill or whatever, you sort of have to test it out yourself and give it a go and work out what works best for you. Yeah, I totally agree with that.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So let’s dig into some of these skills. The first one you talk about is navigation. So we talked about today, most of us use Google Maps or Apple Maps to get around, but you highlight that humans have long been able to navigate great distances without the use of technology. So what can we learn about the human ability to navigate from Polynesian seafaring?
Graham Lee: That’s right. Well, so Polynesian seafaring is one of the only ancient forms of seafaring that actually was recorded in the last strands of people still exhibiting and showing how they used these abilities. In particular, there was a British sailor called David Lewis who went over to some of these far-flung islands and spent time with them. He himself was trying to learn it. He was sort of around the world adventurer. So, he spent time. There was a fantastic book that he wrote. There’s a couple of others that in detail go through all the different methods that these sailors would use when navigating in the open sea. And it’s particularly interesting if you think about navigating in the open sea versus in a city or with landscape around you. It’s far harder because there are very few signs to actually follow. Yet, they would get from point A to point B exactly as they needed to. And how they did it, put simply, is purely by paying attention. So, they were far more observant of their surroundings. They knew what to look out for. They really closely studied different aspects to give them an indication of whether they were going the right way or whether to make any adjustments.
And that was the key thing I found. And another takeaway from it, that it’s a deployment of your attention to the world around you and almost gives you a bit of a handle on your circumstances around you. That’s the main difference.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So, if you’ve seen the movie Moana, the Disney movie Moana, you see a little bit of that Polynesian seafaring. So, they pay attention to things like the stars.
Graham Lee: Yeah.
Brett McKay: And they would have stories that they would pass on orally. It’s basically, they’re telling themselves a story as they’re going from point A to point B. That’s how they remembered, okay, I gotta look for the star in this point of the sky. They’d pay attention to things like water temperature. They put their hand in the water and, you know, based on the temperature, they, well, we’re close or far to land. Pay attention to animals. They’d see animals, I guess the phosphorus in the ocean, sometimes it lights up, it creates sort of a runway for them.
Graham Lee: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. And the color, there’s a certain hue that might appear in clouds, might indicate that they’re over land or they’re over a reef. And even the difference of movement of clouds, they’d spot that certain clouds would slow when going over land versus sea, almost as if it’s held by a kite line. So, little.
Small traces of hints or clues that the person, myself, wouldn’t be so well versed in and these certainly wouldn’t notice them.
Brett McKay: You see this in other indigenous people. I know in Australia, Aborigines, to navigate. They tell themselves a story. They just kind of recite a story to themselves that allows them to get from point A to point B. Part of that story is you have to pay attention to these small details in the landscape. I also know the Inuit, right, in the Arctic, where it’s sort of like the sea, it’s just sort of this landscape that there’s not a lot of difference in how things look, but because they pay attention to really small minutiae, like maybe the snow is a little bit different, the wind is blowing differently, they’re able to navigate vast distances without getting lost.
Graham Lee: Yeah, exactly. No, there’s actually quite a similar example in this sort of white blanketed environment, similar to the sea. You’re quite right.
Brett McKay: So, what are the downsides or the unintended consequences on ourselves and our modern people over-relying on GPS to get around?
Graham Lee: So, I would say two aspects. So, one, the more we use GPS, the less we’re studying our surroundings and focusing and paying attention to them. So, I think there’s just something you lose. A sense of place, I suppose, is probably how I’d describe it, grounding in your environment. But secondly, the more you use your navigation abilities, it does fine-tune your memory, your spatial awareness. There’s certain strengths of mind that it gives you, which undoubtedly carry with you in other parts of your life. And the less you do that, there’s something that just weakens, that gets lost, that I’m sure then impacts you in other parts of your life, and particularly your memory, is totally entwined with your navigation abilities.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So, something scientists have found is the way we remember things, it’s. We actually create, like, a geographical map in our brain. And one of the things that scientists, they’re concerned about, they’re researching this, is that our overreliance on GPS, because we use GPS, we don’t have to create that mental map in our head. As you said, it might have unintended consequences on our memory overall. And one thing that they’re concerned about is it might increase the chances of Alzheimer’s as we get older because, since we’re relying on GPS to do this navigation for us, we don’t have to remember, create this mental memory map in our head that might affect us later on and actually hurt our brain health as we get older.
Graham Lee: Yeah, exactly. There have been quite a number of studies that do confirm this, that practicing navigation abilities really does have quite an effect on your brain. It’s been seen to actually cause brain matter to develop and grow and equally diminish if we’re not using those abilities. So, it definitely something that’s been proven.
Brett McKay: So, what are some things that people can start doing today to reclaim our natural ability to navigate?
Graham Lee: Yeah, I mean, one quite clear one is to just seek to reduce the amount you’re using Sat Nav. And an easy one to try is when you make a trip, try and use it on your outbound trip. And then on your return journey, rely on your own abilities. And by doing that, you can find your way somewhere simply using the Sat Nav. But because you know you’re going to have to do it on your way back, you have to pay more attention. And you’ll notice, in doing that, you suddenly you’re scrutinizing road signs, you’re looking at the fields you’re passing, whatever it might be, to just give you an indication of how to get back. So, straight away you notice that you’re just more alert, you’re more switched on to what’s passing you by.
Brett McKay: Some other action points you provide. Use a printed map. So, buy a printed map of your area. And if you have to navigate, instead of using your Google Maps, look at the printed map first and chart out your journey on the printed map. Because what you’re doing is you’re adding an extra step in your navigation process. Like, you have to use your brain to transfer the information on the map and actually navigate with it.
Graham Lee: That’s right. Yes. Maps are fundamentally different from GPS. I mean, with a map, if you’re out, say, on a hike, you’ve got to turn and orientate that map to match your surroundings. So, you’re going through a mental process to almost overlay it and make sense of it and read it and apply it to your surroundings, where Sat Nav. It’s guiding you step by step. It’s switching to your perspective and it removes those mental leaps and the mental work that you have to do if you’re using a map. So, they’re actually very different.
Brett McKay: Another tip, I’d recommend taking an orienteering class if one’s available in your area. That’s been one of the most fulfilling and satisfying things I’ve done is learning how to orient myself with a mapping compass. And there are all these cool tricks, like math tricks you use to triangulate where you’re at. And it’s cool. You can just look at a map and look at your landscape and use your compass and pinpoint exactly where you’re at.
Graham Lee: Yeah, absolutely. It can be very rewarding, I think, something that really pays back. And I’m quite sure gives you, it’s something that can be intangible in some ways, but certainly, a more connection, a deeper connection with the area around you and you can test yourself and branch out further. And it really does widen, I think, it widens your perspective.
Brett McKay: Okay, so don’t rely on GPS all the time. Maybe use it only in certain situations. Another skill you talk about is movement. How is movement a human skill? And how has technology atrophied our movement skill?
Graham Lee: Yeah, so this was one I perhaps most enjoyed researching because it really did open my eyes to how little we move when we’re at a screen. For all intents and purposes, we practically stop moving the way that a screen catches our attention. So, if you’re watching TV or you’re in the cinema.
It really does pull you in. So, it commands your focus. Naturally, if you’re sat at a laptop, even more because you’re actively engaging with it, you’re moving your hands, a slight sway of your shoulders, and that’s it. Now, if you actually begin to look at the number of hours that a typical person is doing that, they’re surprisingly high. I think we all would think they’re of a certain level. But the number of hours we’re immobilized because of using screens is huge in everyday life nowadays. And if you then compare that to our evolutionary past and what’s led us to have the physical form that we have as human beings, there’s a total mismatch. We evolved primarily to walk and run. We’re one of the few species that is bipedal. I only can look at, say, kangaroos or birds. There’s very few other species that stand on two legs.
And we evolved to do that predominantly as a method of hunting has been found where we were in packs, would hunt down prey, and our main strength has been endurance, that we’re able to cover long distances in ways that a lot of other species simply can’t do. And our bodies basically are primed to walk and run. We have the most fantastic ability, and all aspects of our bodies, are attuned to allow that to happen, and that’s what we’re built to do. So when we stop doing it, when we’re static, sat down, or laid down on the sofa, our muscles degrade, our bones equally suffer. And so many of the health issues that people face today, the biggest source is lack of movement, sedentariness rather than diet, alcohol, smoking, it supersedes all of these. There was one study I came across, it was a substantial study of 300,000 people across Europe, and it found that lack of exercise is the absolute top cause of early death rates. So it’s very important.
Brett McKay: Yeah, we had a guy on the podcast, Herman Pontzer, who studies metabolism, and he’s done a lot of studies on indigenous hunter-gatherers. The big takeaway I got from that episode is that, as you said, human beings are designed to move. We have to move. If we don’t move, then we easily put on body fat. But if you look at other primates, they can just, like, not move at all, and they’ll eat. And instead of their bodies turning that into fat tissue, it just turns into lean tissue. Humans are the opposite. If we consume calories and we don’t move, our body just naturally turns that into fat, and that causes all these other health issues. So I think we’re saying here our technology causes us to be more sedentary, so we have to be proactive about moving more. And so that’s something I’ve tried to do, take walks in the morning and get up from the screen every, you know, 30, 45 minutes and do a little movement break.
Graham Lee: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And what I found illuminating is just considering how much more people walked and ran in the past. One thing I came across was a look at Native American running abilities. So much like Polynesian sailing is one of the last reported examples of that fundamental skill that we’ve had as humans. Native American running is another example of that for how much we used to move. There was a book, an article at one stage that Stuart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, and now, more recently, the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, he asked a writer to compile an analysis of Native American running abilities. And this eventually took shape as a book that you can still get now. It’s called Indian Running, I think, came out in the early 1980s, and it’s fascinating to see how much people ran across all age groups. I mean, this is an ability we take late into life. So endurance sports, it’s one aspect that actually you can follow into your seventies and beyond, as long as you keep that up. And trails and thoroughfares when first sort of arrivals got to North America, South America, trails and thoroughfares were found across the whole span of the American continent.
People, quite obviously, it was their only method of transport, and that’s how they got around, obviously. Now we have cars, we have public transport, and we’re sat down a lot of the time. So there is, our way of living is fundamentally different. So that needs a bit of proactivity to just remind yourself and prompt yourself to just get out and get moving again. But the difference that it can make for your health and wellbeing, physically and mentally, is substantial.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. So another skill you got is reading. How has technology atrophied our reading ability? Arguably, the Internet has only increased the amount we read. We’re constantly reading text messages, social media updates, blog posts, online articles. So how has technology made us worse at reading?
Graham Lee: Yeah, I mean, technology, I think it’s fair to say, has changed how we read. And it’s a strength. Often we become highly capable at scanning vast quantities of text just because of the abundance of information, textual information online. We’re very good at quickly working out if something’s relevant to us. But I find that we often, we sift almost work out what to disregard rather than what to really closely attend to. And I looked at periods in our past where we read actually very differently. And the Renaissance was a time when reading abilities were probably at the highest level as humans. And at that time, reading was very much an active pursuit. So people would sit down and they actually would very typically annotate as they read. So they would mark up, underlining, writing in the margins, what became known as marginalia. So books from that period have scrolls and scribblings all over them. They really were made their own. They also used commonplace books, I just touched on before, where they would note, take and take out the key pieces of information that were relevant for them and write them in their own notebook that they took away with them.
And that active process, where you’re really focused and intently involved in the reading process.
Makes sure that you take away a lot more with you. It becomes part of you is far more easily memorable versus the sort of inattention, in some ways, of just flitting between one thing and the next, not really taking the time to focus. And an online medium just isn’t so disposed to that physicality of marking things up and almost sort of getting a handle on things. And interestingly, in the Renaissance, so many words that were used at the time to describe the different aspects of reading related to the Latin word for hand, manus. So we have like manuscript, manual, and funnily enough, in the marking up that people would do at that time, they’d often use what was called a manicule, which were little pointing fingers that people used to indicate aspects of the text which were most interesting. And today, that’s more commonly we’ll see that on a cursor that we’re moving across on the screen. So it’s quite different.
Brett McKay: Okay, so to improve your reading, make reading more physical, it sounds like…
Graham Lee: Yeah, and more active. So I actually used this method for researching my book. So I only read physical books. I highlighted, underlined, wrote in the books, which I really now enjoy. I feel that they really do make them your own. You know, you’ve got your own thoughts and learning process. It’s there on the page. I hand wrote all my notes. I did then digitize it and use it just so it was a bit more searchable afterward. But I found going through that process, it allowed me to make the topic my own and for me to interrogate it really closely and in a lot of detail and sort of, you know, it can be harder, but that’s just the way it is that I think any proper learning or mental work is an exertion. But that exertion pays off with the information that you gain and the wider sort of learnings and outlook.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I prefer physical books over digital books. I use both in my work, but I find that I absorb more and can remember more when I use a physical book. With physical books, I think there’s that connection between memory and physical location. When I read a physical book, when I open the book up, I have an idea of. Well, I know it’s towards the front of the book and in the upper part of the left-hand page. That bit I’m looking for. You can’t do that with a Kindle book because everything’s just flat. There’s no place to orient yourself.
Graham Lee: Yeah, that’s true. That’s very true. It’s interesting because you’re actually using some of the same aspects of your navigation abilities in some way, spatial awareness. And that’s connecting into your memory and your ability to comprehend something and carry it away for later.
Brett McKay: And something else I’ve been trying to do more of is making time for dedicated reading, where I’ll read for maybe just try an hour, nothing nonstop. And that can be hard if your reading has been just in five-minute spurts. So maybe set aside, like, I’m going to really push myself, get a really dense novel or dense non-fiction book. I’m going to try to read it actively for an hour, and you’ll find yourself, you’ll be pooped after that.
Graham Lee: Yeah, it’s very true. It’s certainly a skill that you hone, that you get increasingly able to handle more text as you go. But as I say, try and read with a pen in hand. If it’s non-fiction or something that you’re trying to study, to take away whatever it might be, something to do with work, or maybe you’re learning how to build a shed or something. Reading with a pen in hand just gets you more involved, and I find that really does help the learning process.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I do that, too. So I got my own little note-taking system that I use when I read a book and prep for a podcast conversation. And then sometimes, if I need to, I’ll write notes at the end of a chapter, kind of summarizing the key takeaways I got from that chapter. So when I go back, I can just pull that easily. And also, I mean, just the act of summarizing helps me understand the material better.
Graham Lee: Well, funnily enough, that’s something that a lot of people did in the Renaissance. And Montaigne, the French philosopher, he did exactly that. He summarized at the start of his books the key outputs. So there’s certain habits that just make sense and naturally work.
Brett McKay: So there’s three skills you highlight in the book art, writing, and thought that have recently been encroached upon by artificial intelligence. So you can use ChatGPT to create images, get ideas, and you could spit out some pretty well-written articles in just a matter of seconds. And I want to talk in particular about writing because, as someone who makes their living writing, I think a lot about what these large language models like ChatGPT are going, what effect they’re going to have on the profession of writing, and even if and how the fundamentals of writing are going to be taught to kids in the future. We’ve already touched on this a bit earlier, but what do you think we miss out on when we don’t engage in writing and just let artificial intelligence do the writing for us?
Graham Lee: Yeah, well, I think we miss out on a lot. So in the book, I look at Winston Churchill, who, although most people think of him naturally as a wartime leader, his second profession was as a writer. Existing words that were written by him total around 20 million words that appeared in his published books, his speeches, his memos, and various documents that he created through his career. So it’s hard to find any other leader of such well-known notoriety that wrote so much. So it was very much something that was part of who he was and helped him untangle his thoughts and clarify the direction he wanted to go on any topic. And he dictated a lot. He dictated in the car, the bath. One of his assistants would use a muffled typewriter to try and make sure that she didn’t disrupt his thoughts as he spoke. So he found that the act of speaking equally helped his thinking. And there is, I think, a fair argument to say that that nuanced approach to assembling and structuring his thoughts allowed him to have a far more ready appreciation of the risk that Hitler and the Nazis showed before the start of the war.
And he was ahead of everyone else in Parliament in the UK in indicating that there was a substantial risk. But if you compare that to texts being assembled for you, clearly you’re not involved in the creation, so you’re not having to structure your thinking to assemble your own logic and thread of thought, and that’s a key difference. And I think something that really will, if you allow that to happen too much, will impinge on your ability to think through knotty, complicated problems.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Something that I’ve noticed is, you know, this is why we generally have authors as guests on the podcast, and why we typically focus on talking about books. Something I noticed is that when someone has only offered their thoughts orally, like they’ve just done coaching, videos, podcasts, things like that, they often have trouble articulating their ideas in a sustained way. Like, they have these good nuggets of thoughts, but they haven’t synthesized them yet, and writing forces you to do that. So I like talking to authors because they’ve already gone through that difficult process of synthesizing their thoughts. So usually what they have to say is a little more organized and coherent than someone whose thoughts have just been bouncing around in their head. So basically what I’ve observed is that writing improves thinking.
Graham Lee: I think Absolutely. Writing, I think, is a way where you can structure and organize your thoughts on the page. I mean, it’s interesting, if you think about it, these large language models, they have come about through the organization of text. You know, they’re fed huge reams of text from across the internet. It’s textually based, and that’s what’s led to intelligence and the form of AI that we now understand today. That in itself shows the value of our relationship with text.
Brett McKay: And you also talk about the ChatGPT and these other large language models. They’re impressive. You can just give it a prompt, and it can write something that just. It’s amazing. It’s really good. But you argue that there’s some things that ChatGPT can’t capture that human writing can. What do you think AI can’t replicate in human writing and thought?
Graham Lee: Well, I think one of the fundamental aspects is, however intelligent AI gets, so there’s no doubt that certain human abilities, AI is already beginning to match, and obviously, it surpasses us in certain areas. It can scan volumes of data that we would never be able to do and quickly churn out text at speed that we just couldn’t match. So it clearly surpasses us in certain areas, but there’s other areas where it just can’t match what we do. It doesn’t exist in a physical world, so it doesn’t have a way to empathize and understand someone else’s perspective. It basically doesn’t have a perspective. It doesn’t have its own viewpoint on the world. It’s just fed text that’s been created by humans or increasingly also other AI tools.
Brett McKay: So you can’t bring in that subjective experience.
Graham Lee: Yeah, and I think that’s a key aspect. I mean, if you think about Winston Churchill and the decision making he would have had to have made during some of the most hotly difficult periods in the Second World War, he would have framed any decisions based on his own life experiences and his acknowledgement of how other people operate in the world, and that would have been grounded in his own real-world experiences. A computer simply doesn’t have that.
Brett McKay: Is it possible to use AI as a supplement to your writing and thinking?
Graham Lee: Absolutely. Absolutely. So my view certainly is nothing wholesale negative on AI at all. It’s immensely powerful and can be really, really useful. When I was researching this and really playing around with AI tools and writing the book, one thing I sort of came back to is often in philosophical thought, there’s an interrogation. The Socratic method, in particular, is questioning, is asking questions of thoughts that you or someone else might have and trying to get to the core of the matter. And you can do that with AI. So you might have a problem you’re wrestling with or a dilemma. And naturally, it’s great to talk about that with a friend or someone in your family. But equally with AI, you can now, because it’s human language-based, you can critique your thoughts and compare them to the human record, to just the swathes of information that exist online and zero in on that to get some feedback on your thoughts. So that’s immensely useful.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve been exploring different tools that are out there now. I know Google just launched this thing called Notebook LM where you can upload text that you’re using for your research and then you can just start asking the AI questions like, well, are there any connections between this concept and this concept? And it’ll go through all this research and help you find that. It’s basically like having a research assist like a human research assistant.
Graham Lee: Yep.
Brett McKay: And I think, yeah, AI can be useful in that sense, but then actually figuring out the best way to express that, you leave that to yourself.
Graham Lee: Yeah. I mean, one thing I look at in the book is that Churchill had a team of assistants. So he had assistants, it would note down when he dictated, but he also had great minds and thinkers of the day. So one guy that went on to head up the UN, various Oxford and Cambridge graduates that compiled fresh new information for him that he then assimilated into his writing and his thinking processes, he was a man with resources, and in his day, it would be very difficult for most people to arrange such a setup. Today, actually, you can achieve that with AI tools. There’s huge power in that, and it levels the ability for us to operate in a similar way.
Brett McKay: Okay, so use AI to help you with your research, maybe find connections. And then going back to this idea of, you should still learn the rules of grammar and how to write because, yeah, AI can do that. But there’s instances where I think AI gets it wrong. So I use Grammarly, but as I’m going through the suggested changes that Grammarly makes, sometimes I’m like, no, Grammarly. I don’t think that’s good, actually. I want to end that sentence with a preposition.
Graham Lee: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Even though it’s not grammatically correct, it just sounds better. So if you have that ability, innate ability to write, you can make better decisions with AI.
Graham Lee: Yeah. No, I agree.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So another skill you talk about is craftsmanship. And you talk about what we can learn from watchmakers on how the power to craft can make us human. So what can we learn from watchmakers?
Graham Lee: Well, so my thought with craft is it’s anything where you’re making things with your hands. So there’s a physical intelligence that too often today gets lost in the screen work we’re doing, where, as much as we talked about the benefits of dealing with text, etcetera, there isn’t a physicality to it. And if you think back to any DIY projects you might have done recently or maybe projects at school, sometimes we have to go back quite far to find examples of it because sadly, it has gone missing in a large number of our lives. The process of working with your hands and learning how to do something certainly is a different type of intelligence. You’re actually thinking with your body motion to get around something and work out how to do it. And that was something that we used to do a lot more of. So in the book, I look at a particular watchmaker called George Daniels, who passed away only a few years ago, but he himself learned. I think it was something like 140 different, what used to be individual crafts. So skills that people worked on in the clock industry in Europe, he mastered all of them and handcrafted his own very, very sort of top-quality watches.
So I look at how the process he went through learning those skills and actually, in the process of doing it, he ended up innovating and creating a new watch movement. It’s called the escapement, the ticking element in a watch which controls its time. He actually invented a wholly new method, eventually was purchased by Omega and still used today. So that physicality of work actually allowed him to really innovate and find new ways forward. Yeah.
Brett McKay: And you make the case that at the time there was technology of like there are computer design tools that watchmakers use to design watches. And you make the case that these design tools probably couldn’t have made that innovation because they’re not in the physical world. It took this guy being actually working with this stuff, physically to see, “Oh, I can do this differently, and it will work because he was able to test in real time, be able to learn through his body. You couldn’t do that with a computer.”
Graham Lee: Exactly. Those sort of clinks and clanks of just dealing with the reality of the world where things don’t work versus moving things around on the screen. And watch designers, now, there are a certain number of software tools that they use, and a lot of the steps that George Daniels would have had to painstakingly have gone through himself to learn and understand the very working mechanics of a watch, it’s just a click of a button or a dropdown to just do that, add this. So naturally, the actual full understanding gets lost because you’re just selecting options rather than actually going through the process yourself.
Brett McKay: Why do you think people who might not engage in craft for a living, someone who’s not a watchmaker or a carpenter, maybe they just sit at a computer all day managing spreadsheets. Why should they incorporate craft into their lives?
Graham Lee: Well, one, it’s very enjoyable and it’s rewarding. Again, if you think of it, if you try and think of something you’ve done recently that was more of a physical challenge. I mean, sometimes it might be like assembling flat pack furniture, something like that. Actually, it’s quite rewarding. And the process you go through, the challenge of it all feels different. It feels different from working on a spreadsheet, say, and you’re using sort of your own, your whole bodily being to tackle something and that. Yeah, it’s fundamentally different. So I think if you are overly screen-based, and a lot of us are trying to find opportunities to do that, whether it’s certain tasks in the house or the garden just ground you a bit, I think, and pulls you out of your head and into more your physicality and the world around you.
Brett McKay: And I think also it can help improve your work in that digital realm. So, going back to Winston Churchill, he was a wordsmith. His work was thinking and writing, but he had hobbies that weren’t thinking and writing. They were very tactile. So he painted something. He did. I also know he laid brick, that is, his estate. He did some landscaping as well, so he made time for that. And I think it actually improved his writing and thinking. Cause when you’re doing the sort of like, manual tactile things, sometimes you’re often just thinking about work or maybe a problem at work, and having that physical thing kind of distracts you a bit and you’re a little bit more unfocused. I mean, when you’re in that unfocused state, you’re able to make connections you otherwise wouldn’t have made.
Graham Lee: That’s right. I mean, he suffered from depression. He called it his black dog of depression. And he would build walls, as you mentioned. And, yeah, I think that was a way of dealing with his thoughts, ruminating and trying to work through difficult stages. Absolutely. So, it can be good for that. I mean, it has been found to be good for our mental well-being. There’s no doubt about that, that we get a boost from doing physical tasks. So, it’s certainly something to look at.
Brett McKay: All right, so find a hobby where you have to use your hands.
Graham Lee: Exactly. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Could be carpentry, could be, you know, pottery, whatever. Find that. One more skill I want to talk about is solitude. How is solitude a skill?
Graham Lee: Yeah. So, what I look at with solitude is the fact that today we’re so connected with our devices, always switched on, really, whether that’s receiving emails, texts, checking online for news, etcetera. And if you compare that to most of our past, we gravitated between.
Whole, total engagement in physical conversation and then lots of time on our own, switched off, where we could really explore our own thoughts, daydream, and just be grounded in who we are as a person. In the book, I look at an example of Alexander Selkirk, who was a castaway on an island just off of Chile. And actually, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s book was based on him. So there was a real world, real-life Robinson Crusoe, and he was. He was cast away for four and a half years. He was a difficult character who almost caused a mutiny on board a ship that he was on, and he was thrown off by the captain to this island. But through the course of his stay there, he changed. He became more at ease with himself. And in the book, I sort of look at, well, when we spend time on our own, what.
What is the value of it? What can we achieve? And it can be quite nuanced, but very deep. And actually, the effects can be really quite changing for us. I mean, any form of religion or spiritual viewpoint tends to consider that it’s time alone, where we can fully begin to comprehend our relationship with the world and the universe and our place within it. So it’s why the likes of monks or dervishes, whatever it might be, have always sought out time away to try and just work through that thinking. So Alexander Selkirk inadvertently found himself in that position, not of his choosing, but he benefited from it. And actually, when he was saved and brought back to London, eventually he was found on board the ship to be very much a changed character. He was given responsibilities to lead the ship, but when he got back to London, he sank back into his old ways, drinking too much, violence. So the benefits he found when he was alone were lost back in society. And human society has often wrestled with that notion of how do we take so much of the benefits that we have when we have time alone to really sit and be in our own company, into the busy throes of our social life? How can we match the two? And my thinking is that today, in our digital lives, there’s even more of a need for that.
How do we remain grounded in our own sort of viewpoint and being when we’re bombarded with information and drawn this way and that, and our attention directed in all manner of different ways, how do we keep control of who we are? So that’s when I talk about a skill of solitude. It’s what abilities can you hone? So you sustain that through your life. And all notions like. Or exercises like meditation or physical practices like yoga or qigong, which are becoming increasingly popular, seek to do that. Mindfulness, obviously, has become popular disciplined aspects like that, I think, are more and more relevant for our digital world to keep us grounded.
Brett McKay: Well, Graham, there’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Graham Lee: Well, you can find the book anywhere, really, where you would hope to find it. Yeah. So that’s what I’d suggest, any retailer, and I hope anyone who reads it finds it useful.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Graham Lee, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Graham Lee: Thanks a lot.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Graham Lee. He’s the author of the book “Human Being: Reclaim Twelve Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology.” It’s available on Amazon.com. Do check out our show notes at AOM’s website, where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We have a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take 1 minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the AOM podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.
